Speak, Memory by Vladamir Nabokov

735 Words3 Pages

To some degree, every artist creates his or her own artistic life preserver, and in doing so resequences and conserves their own artistic DNA so that it may be transferred onto another generation. Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, is not only that preserver, but the tug boat that it holds onto, heavy and cramped with the memories and history that Nabokov retells his readers against the currents of time. Speak, Memory operates thematically, not chronologically. Nabokov returns anew to his early childhood and pulls in, as it were, the memories associated with certain themes. Then he turns, changes directions, and sets off again. One such theme that resonates throughout the novel is that of exile and deteterritorialization, both…show more content…

(79)” Even early on in his childhood, Nobokov found those “comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization” as nothing more than useful necessities. The extinct “tradition learning” that is taken on by him is private multilingual tutorship, even if now it seems like a very pluralistic one as it included both Russian, English and French—at the same time. It is this because of this multilingual education that Nabokov encounters less wonder in terms of cultural conflicts that usually plights other exiles. Nabokov’s traditional aristocratic background accentuates many of his experiences abroad, he internalizes spiritual deteterritorialization and finds enjoyment within it. But it is also this spiritual deterritorialization that follows Nabokov throughout his life that makes his account of his life seem more artistic and disconnected, even if there is a profound emotional impact on the reader in the end. While some moments in his life might evoke sympathy, like his retelling of his father’s death, or make readers to take a side, such as the incident with Nesbit during his time in Cambridge, Nabokov keeps the reader at a distance by concealing his feelings in rhetoric. An example of this is the “short biography” (173) of his father. Using vivid details to describe his father, one can feel the spiritual resonance the experience had on Nabokov. “And behind it all there was yet a very special emotional abyss that I was

exactly how it happened and being told without bias. An unreliable narrator can leave the audience feeling as though the story may have been portrayed, described or told not entirely truthful. The well-known novel Lolita, written by author Vladimir Nabokov, contains an unreliable narrator throughout the entire novel. The story, narrated by protagonist, Humbert, revolves around him and his daughter. Humbert can be seen as unreliable narrator because he is an unstable, manipulative person and shows untrustworthy…

the novel, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, love between Lolita and Humbert Humbert is unattainable.
To begin, Humbert has a hard time realizing that the past is in the past. Throughout the novel, he tries to recreate his childhood relationship that he had with Annabel Leigh. The relationship he had with her was an important part of his life, saying “Annabel was no nymphet to me: I was her equal, a faun let in my own right, it was an enchanted island of time” (Nabokov 18). Humbert Humbert is yearning…

To Speak or Not To Speak
Imagine, you have just given birth to your first child. Emotions of happiness, love, and excitement surround you and your partner as you adore the newborn baby lying in your arms. You are so relieved that the labor went smoothly and to know that your baby was born completely normal, or so the doctors say. However, a couple years later, you are having premonitions that your child is not developing normally. He is not responding to your voice, nor does he react to loud noises…

when a toddler learns not to put silverware in an electrical socket. Yet, how are many lessons learned in life? Simply said, the answer is through speech. Whether by a mother’s worried scolding or a professor’s educated explanation, being able to speak is the general way of spreading knowledge, and quite frankly why humans created language. With this evident, the freedom of speech is irrefutably one of the most vital gifts given, especially during times of mental exploration like that in a college…

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, is a highly aesthetic writer. Most of his work shows an amazing interest in and talent for language. He deceptively uses language in Lolita to mask and make the forbidden divine. Contextually, Lolita may be viewed as a novel about explicit sexual desire. However, it is the illicit desire of a stepfather for his 12-year old stepdaughter. The novel’s subject inevitably conjures up expectations of pornography, but there in not a…

man of many talents, Vladimir Nabokov is known not only for his controversial work Lolita, he was also an avid lepidopterist – in particular, butterflies. There is no doubt that when penning Lolita’s character, Nabokov imprinted several butterfly characteristics on her. This essay however does not seek to investigate the parallels between Lolita and the metamorphosis of a butterfly. Rather, it takes the road less travelled and examines the parallels between Nabokov and Humbert Humbert, not as a pervert…

Americans romanticize Lolita and ignore her kidnapping and rape because Americans tend to blame rape victims and sympathize with their rapists.
“Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” (Nabokov 9). Lolita is a story written in the 1950's by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov in which the narrator, Humbert Humbert, falls in love with a 12 year old girl.
The story starts with a murder confession, and goes on to when Humbert first moves into the home of Charlotte Haze. He immediately…

mania” (Nabokov, “Signs” 600) and his immigrant parents struggling to cope with his condition and recurrent suicide attempts during his residence in an insane asylum. The boy is afflicted with a strain of intense paranoia that leaves him to believe everything external—trees, pebbles, clouds—are malevolently conspiring against him, that “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence…Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme” (Nabokov, “Signs”…

understand some aspects of ourselves through studying others. The reading of SPEAK, a somewhat controversial book because of its subject matter – rape--, is a worthwhile endeavor in any middle school classroom and offers many valuable life lessons to young teens.
Resilience is a key life moral for one to learn that is essential to a successful life. It is one of the main lessons that can be extracted from the novel SPEAK. The definition of resilience is the ability to get back on the right path…

In Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, the main character Humbert Humbert writes a memoir of the rape, incest, and murder he becomes involved in. Throughout the novel the chaos is swept under a carpet that consists of manipulative and linguistic trickery. Instantly in the foreword, the author opens up calling the novel Lolita the “Confession of a White Widowed Male” as an attempt to highlight Humbert’s good side, being a husband, rather than explaining why the novel is named after a girl Humbert raped…